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Kate wants to end it all when the time is right

Kate is sitting in a downtown coffee shop detailing the orchestration of her own eventual death.

As she speaks, her body sways from side to side, sometimes in slow, fluid motion, at others in awkward jerks.

Her words are punctuated by occasional facial tics.

With careful precision, she calmly describes how she will attach an oxygen tank to a plastic hood. Or, if possible, ingest a cocktail of drugs.

The 77-year-old mother of two, who has asked that her real name not be published, has a neurodegenerative disease similar to Huntington’s which announces itself insidiously through a gradual loss of physical control.

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While she remains engaged and active for now, she knows where this may be heading.

“You don’t have to get permission to get pregnant, you don’t have to get permission to get an abortion,” says the retired teacher. “I don’t feel you should have to get permission from anybody to commit suicide . . .

“If this gets worse, I’m not sticking around.”

Kate’s intentions give voice to a complex legal and ethical grey area in Canada.

While suicide is legal, Kate’s experience demonstrates that the path for those who choose to take matters into their own hands is a difficult one, often filled with adversity.

Last April, she ordered a do-it-yourself suicide “hood” from an online retailer in the U.S. — part of her preparation for when she decides the time is right.

Weeks later, U.S. authorities shut down the operation.

But the tentacles of the investigation reached into the company’s client list.

Toronto Police officers visited Kate’s Toronto home on August 19 last year where they “explained in blunt language” to her son and a neighbor that Kate had ordered a suicide hood and was in danger of committing suicide, according to a notice of application filed in court.

After police discovered she was at her cottage in Muskoka, they sent word to Ontario Provincial Police, the courts records allege.

OPP officers arrived on Kate’s Muskoka cottage doorstep the same day.

Kate admitted to purchasing the helium hood for the purposes of suicide at some point in the future, reminding them that her choice is legal in Canada.

But the meeting quickly took a fractious tone when police insisted her hood order was sufficient evidence to apprehend her under the Mental Health Act, Kate wrote in a formal complaint to Ontario’s Office of the Independent Police Review Director.

She refused to get in their car and instead ran into her cabin, she says.

Police officers then threatened to “kick the door in and drag me out.”

An hour-long standoff, with Kate leaning on one side of the door and a police foot on the other, finally ended when ambulance staff arrived, she wrote in her complaint.

“During that time my niece assured him in a quiet tone that I was not suicidal. He ignored her,” the complaint reads. “He said he would drag me through the woods…Throughout, he treated me as a suspect in a drug raid.”

She eventually agreed to go with ambulance attendants to the hospital, and was released later.

Her complaints against Toronto Police Service and the OPP were both dismissed by the Office of the Independent Police Review Director last fall. The matter is now under review before the divisional court.

The position of the forces is not available on the public record and both declined comment.

Since first learning of her disease in 2005 and eventually deciding she would likely take her life one day, Kate says she has experienced uncomfortable silences with doctors unwilling to engage in the conversation.

One social worker she met demanded the word “suicide” not be used when they spoke, she says.

“Under the present system, we have doctors and social workers unable to help frightened patients with nasty diagnoses. We have police who, in my case, threaten to drag me through the woods to their car because the FBI had notified them I ordered a helium hood. And we have relatives and friends who may be charged with abetting suicide if they even know of, much less help with, someone’s attempt to end their life.”

That needs to change, Kate declares.

For all of us.

Death — as both concept and actual event — appears to hold no fear for her.

There are things much worse than death to worry about.

“What people my age are afraid of is the nursing home,” she says. “If you ask older people, especially healthy older people, they aren’t going to say ‘death.’ It’s lack of dignity, lack of control.”

Her conviction is unencumbered by belief in a larger meaning of life or concern about spiritual judgment.

She is agnostic.

She believes we are here and, eventually, we are not.

“If you’re Christian, God is watching, praising, and God will judge. There’s nobody watching in my world. I don’t think there is a higher purpose. I think we’re in life willy-nilly and you do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

Her children and ex-husband are aware of her plans.

But she wants to do this alone.

“There’s nothing really frightening about dying if I can take a pill and die right away,” she says. “But you can’t get the pills you need.”

The thought of pulling a plastic hood over her head and filling it with helium is far less reassuring to her. But it may be the only accessible means.

“I had a fantasy about going to the cottage in the fall, sitting there with a drink and taking my pills and quietly going off. But the fantasy turned around when I thought about raccoons nibbling on my body. It was a nice idea.”

So now, her plan is to do it at home, by herself.

“I’ve thought about what makes life sensible to live and what makes it sensible to leave. Changes happen and when you’re older the changes are mostly negative. At a certain point, the disadvantages of being alive are going to outweigh the advantages. When that happens, I want to choose.”

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